“A Different Level of Crazy”: Is Civil War Breaking Out in The Wall Street Journal Over the Editorial Board’s Coverage of Mueller?

A series of virulent anti-Mueller editorials has reporters worried about their paper’s credibility.

“The editorial page has been doing crazy shit for a long time,” a former long-serving Wall Street Journal editor told me this week. This person was referencing the time-honored divide in most journalistic organizations between the newsroom and the opinion desk. At the Journal, that divide can be particularly fraught. While the paper has long been a leading bastion of conservative thinking, its editorial writers are known to take positions that are more extreme than many of their colleagues in the newsroom can stomach.

The friction is, in some ways, a hallmark of the institution. A decade ago, an editorial-page columnist attacked a 2006 Journal series about the practice of backdating stock-option awards that went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. The page also once defended billionaire junk-bond king Michael Milken, who got a 10-year sentence for securities fraud in 1990 based in part on exposés by Journal reporters. Nevertheless, several Journal veterans I spoke with described the current rift as among the more fractious they’ve witnessed. “It does feel like this is a different level of crazy,” the veteran editor said.

In recent days, of course, the opinion coverage has produced controversial commentary on Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation, often flying in the face of the Journal’s own news reporting. On October 23, political scientist Peter Berkowitzproclaimed that the probe into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign “threaten[s] the rule of law.” Days later, an October 29 piece by two attorneys from the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations called on President Donald Trump to “immediately [issue] a blanket presidential pardon to anyone involved in supposed collusion.” Meanwhile, Journal editorial board member Kimberley Strassel filed an October 26 column raining opprobrium on Fusion GPS, the intelligence outfit that commissioned former British spook Christopher Steele to compile the now infamous Trump-Russia dossier. Most recently, there was an editorial that acknowledged the indictments of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his business partner Richard Gates for non-campaign-related alleged money laundering. The editorial’s main thrust, however, seemed to be to excoriate Democrats for “their role in financing Fusion.” The editorial referred to Fusion as “sleazy operators”; it didn’t mention that the guys who run Fusion were previously Wall Street Journal reporters. Former high-ranking Journal editor Bill Grueskin spoke for many when he tweeted, “WSJ edit page has gone full bats--t.”

The entry that really made people spit out their coffee, however, was an editorial published last week declaring that Mueller, who once ran the F.B.I., “lacks the critical distance to conduct a credible probe.” It also proposed that Mueller “could best serve the country by resigning to prevent further political turmoil over that conflict of interest.”

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The piece was published on October 25, but it didn’t explode until Sunday, when Twitter was flooded with disparaging reactions as media and political junkies eagerly awaited the following morning’s indictment fireworks. “There are no words to describe how disgraceful and dangerous this coordinated attack against Robert Mueller is,” notedJoe Scarborough. Recode’s Kara Swisher, a Journal alum, sneered, “I feel sorry for every decent reporter at the WSJ for this claptrap from Rupert Murdoch’s ever desiccated soul.”

Swisher was presumably referring to the fact that three of Murdoch’s beloved organs—the Journal, the New York Post, and Fox News—have been firing missiles at the Mueller probe in what would appear to be a three-pronged attack. “I’m watching now and screaming,” a Fox News personality told CNN
about the network’s coverage earlier this week. “I want to quit.” One Journal veteran compared the paper’s recent opinion-page coverage of Mueller to the way it handled the Clinton controversies of the early 90s, telling me: “It’s like living through the Vince Foster years.” (Foster, a close Clinton colleague and friend, was a target back then; his suicide in 1993 amid pressures stemming from the Clinton probes was fuel for conspiracy theories, similar to how the Trump era’s most right-leaning talking heads have seized on the murder of Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich.)

Members of a group of prominent conservatives pushing congressional Republicans to support the Mueller investigation told The Washington Post they were worried that the influence of Fox, the Post, and the Journal would encourage Trump to fire Mueller and “spark a constitutional crisis,” as Post reporter David Weigel put it. One of the conservatives cited the recent Journal writings, telling Weigel, “The infotainment side of the conservative media, they’ve been completely Trumpified for some time. The Wall Street Journal was another story. That was surprising to me. I didn’t regard them as part of the Trump right. When they wrote an editorial suggesting that Mueller resign, I felt that needed a response.”

Journal reporters, who have long accepted the paper’s role in the conservative-thought ecosystem, aren’t generally fazed by the writings of the editorial page. But several current reporters told me that the recent Mueller commentary—particularly the call for him to resign—has been a source of frustration. That frustration partly stems from the fact that the Journal, which was left eating The New York Times’s and Washington Post’s dust during the early part of the Trump administration, has been breaking through in its coverage of the White House and the Russia probes. Over the weekend, for instance, it didn’t go unnoticed that the Journal, unlike the Times and the Post, was able to corroborate CNN’s explosive reporting that Mueller’s first indictments were imminent. In the preceding weeks and months, the Journal landed scoops about a grand jury being convened; about the details of the suicide of a Republican activist who had been trying to get his hands on Hillary Clinton’s e-mails from Russian hackers; and about a concurrent Manafort investigation by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office. “People are always mad about our editorials undermining our reporting,” a Journal reporter told me, “but it is definitely more infuriating on this topic than anything else since we’ve made good progress on Russia lately. It’s frustrating to have to contend with this, even if smart people recognize the separation between the editorial side and news.” As another reporter told me, “We could disprove half the stuff” the opinion writers “are saying if they just read our own reporting. It’s like living in some alternate universe.”

The discrepancy can be awkward. Recently, national security reporter Shane Harris tweeted a link to that October 26 editorial, which was titled, “Democrats, Russians and the FBI; Did the bureau use disinformation to trigger its Trump probe?” Along with the link, Harris wrote, “US intel agencies developed their own reporting on Trump/Russia contacts. Some back to 2015.” And in a subsequent tweet: “Dossier didn’t exist when FBI investigation began. Fmr snr intel official also told me it played zero role in conclusion of Russian meddling.” A reader asked, “then why is your editorial board putting out garbage editorials saying the opposite?” “I have no role in what the editorial board chooses to write,” Harris replied. Indeed, while the Journal didn’t have a comment for this article, a spokeswoman pointed me to a tweet yesterday from @WSJopinion reinforcing its independence from the newsroom. Editorial page editor Paul Gigot also declined to comment.

The latest editorial-page meshugas has agitated nerves in a newsroom already on edge. In addition to layoffs, buyouts, restructuring, and gender-imbalance concerns, there’s been a well-documented drama this past year-and-a-half over editor-in-chief Gerry Baker’s direction of the paper’s Trump coverage, and I’m told that murmurs about a looming leadership change have reached a “fever pitch.” But one of the most morale-killing developments for many insiders has been the exodus of valuable newsroom talent to competing outlets, including prominent reporters like Adam Entous (to the Post and then The New Yorker) and Devlin Barrett (the Post), as well as high-ranking editors like David Enrich (the Times) and, most notably, Rebecca Blumenstein (ditto), who was seen as the beating heart of the newsroom before she left back in February.

Some wonder whether the editorial page will lead to more reporters and editors heading for the exit. Over the weekend, former Journal reporter Neil Kingtweeted, “I don’t know a single WSJ alum who’s not agog at where that edit page is heading.” On Tuesday, the Journal published an editorial chastising Politico reporter Jason Schwartz for not initially specifying King’s current affiliation with Fusion GPS in Schwartz’s article citing the tweet. “Mr. Schwartz,” the editorial continued, “also failed to point out that Mr. King’s wife, Shailagh Murray, also a former Journal reporter, worked in the Obama White House. Perhaps Mr. Schwartz understands that this kind of political incestuousness is so routine in Washington that even to mention it would get him drummed out of the club.”

The newsroom, sources there told me, was “appalled” by what they perceived as a cheap attack on two former colleagues. Jonathan Martin, a Politico alumnus and national political correspondent at The New York Times, said publicly what many W.S.J.-ers are probably stewing over in private. “This sort of approach,” he tweeted, “is only gonna continue the exodus of top-flight reporters from the WSJ.”

“The editorial page has been doing crazy shit for a long time,” a former long-serving Wall Street Journal editor told me this week. This person was referencing the time-honored divide in most journalistic organizations between the newsroom and the opinion desk. At the Journal, that divide can be particularly fraught. While the paper has long been a leading bastion of conservative thinking, its editorial writers are known to take positions that are more extreme than many of their colleagues in the newsroom can stomach.